This is a blog to give friends and loved ones an opportunity to view the progress of the sailing adventures of Captain Don Montgomery and The Admiral Lana Montgomery.

5.16.2008

Getting Wired

The major wood and paint work is complete. There are still some minor areas that need to be address but the big important stuff is complete. We will be posting some photos as soon as the new stem fitting is in place for the staysail stay. We may be able to get to that this weekend. We have both been working longer than normal hours at our land side jobs but we were able to start the rewire project this week. The first thing we had to do was pick a location for the new electrical panel. You will see photos of the front and back of the old panel. You will also note that I had to cut into a post next to the old panel to make room for the new panel around the corner. The current panel has 20 breakers on it. The new one will have 35 DC breakers and 5 AC breakers as well as a monitor that will measure amp hour usage, voltage among other pertinent information and will have alarms for high and low voltage. There is also a photo showing the new panel face mounted and ready for the module cutouts for the breaker switches. Once the new breakers are installed then we will begin to move the load over to the new panel. This new system will also has a new style battery switch that is either on, off or combines the engine and house bank for emergency. There will be an echo charger that will monitor the charge rate and keep the engine battery at full charge at all times.

After the panel was made ready we started the first phase of the wire project. All of the main heavy battery cables are now replaced with color coded 4/0 GA marine cable. Yellow is for negative and red is for positive. During this phase we also place 350 amp in line fuses in the cable within 12 inches of the positive battery terminal. This fuse will protect the system in the event of an accidental direct short of the cable. All cables were placed in heavy duty cable cradles with reusable plastice band ties. We used about 50 ft of the 4/0 cable to tie the whole system together. Phase II will begin in about 10 days and that will be where we start moving the loads to the new panel. Phase III will involve new wire runs to replace the untinned wire on the boat. Once the wiring project is complete we will install the new keel cooled refrigeration system. We are excited about this as it will allow us to make ice cubes and will use much less energy than the current system. We are also in the process of designing and procuring the solar system that will allow us to be completely energy independent of fossil fuel and other costly sources of energy for our sailing adventure. Stay tuned and we will report our progress.

Oh, by the way. Happy belated Mother's Day for all the Moms reading the blog! The Admiral and I went fishing after church on Mom's day and caught a bunch of salt water Pinfish. They are the equivalent to the fresh water blue gill. They do not yield a lot of meat but the food value is very good, they are little fighters and they taste great.